ners were their own
police mostly, and didn't seem to want keeping right. We always expected
the miners to be a disorderly, rough set of people--it was quite the
other way. Only we had got into a world where everybody had everything
they wanted, or else had the money to pay for it. How different it
seemed from the hard, grinding, poverty-stricken life we had been
brought up to, and all the settlers we knew when we were young! People
had to work hard for every pound they made then, and, if they hadn't the
ready cash, obliged to do without, even if it was bread to eat. Many
a time we'd had no tea and sugar when we were little, because father
hadn't the money to pay for it. That was when he stayed at home and
worked for what he got. Well, it was honest money, at any rate--pity he
hadn't kept that way.

Now all this was changed. It wasn't like the same country. Everybody
dressed well, lived high, and the money never ran short, nor was likely
to as long as the gold kept spreading, and was found in 10, 20, 50 pound
nuggets every week or two. We had a good claim, and began to think about
six months' work would give us enough to clear right away with. We let
our hair grow long, and made friends with some Americans, so we began
to talk a little like them, just for fun, and most people took us for
Yankees. We didn't mind that. Anything was better than being taken for
what we were. And if we could get clear off to San Francisco there were
lots of grand new towns springing up near the Rocky Mountains, where a
man could live his life out peaceably, and never be heard of again.

As for Starlight he'd laid it out with his two noble friends to go back
to Sydney in two or three months, and run down to Honolulu in one of the
trading vessels. They could get over to the Pacific slope, or else have
a year among the Islands, and go anywhere they pleased. They had got
that fond of Haughton, as he called himself--Frank Haughton--that
nothing would have persuaded them to part company. And wasn't he a man
to be fond of?--always ready for anything, always good-tempered except
when people wouldn't let him, ready to work or fight or suffer hardship,
if it came to that, just as cheerful as he went to his dinner--never
thinking or talking much about himself, but always there when he was
wanted. You couldn't have made a more out-and-out all round man to live
and die with; and yet, wasn't it a murder, that there should be that
against him, when it cam